An Inclusive Community

We are committed to increasing access to our program for BIPOC students. We offer scholarships to PEN’s Emerging Voices Fellows and increased funding options for the emerging voices we want to support and read. We listen, learn and aim build an inclusive community through sustained dialogue and practice.

Inclusion & Equity

We listen, reflect, engage, and facilitate proactive conversations. We read books that reflect world voices. We cultivate an antiracist and social justice reading list. We commit to solidarity and action. Our Office of Diversity and Inclusion is central to our commitment. Beyond The West is a reading list we actively cultivate.

One Book

The Bennington community reads a book collectively each term for our One Book initiative. Each book is selected by our students. Many times, the book has been published by a Visiting Writer and we have the pleasure of organizing a lunchtime discussion. Most recent books read for One Book include: Natalie Diaz When My Brother was an Aztec, Monica Youn Blackacre, Jamel Brinkley A Lucky Man

World Lit Café

Students and faculty organize World Lit Cafe to read works from global voices and to discuss their intellectual and cultural footprint in the world of letters and beyond. Students, alumni, and faculty keep a list of books to recommend to students as they compile their reading lists with their teachers.

RECENT FACULTY & GUESTS

Gregory Pardlo is the author of Totem (2007), winner of the APR/Honickman First Book Prize; and Digest (2014), winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. The Pulitzer judges cited Pardlo’s “clear-voiced poems that bring readers the news from 21st Century America, rich with thought, ideas and histories public and private.”

Peter Balakian is the author of the memoir Black Dog of Fate, winner of the PEN/Albrand Prize for memoir and a New York Times Notable Book and The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America’s Response.

Asali Solomon is an American professor, author, and novelist. Solomon has written two books. Her first, Get Down, was a collection of short stories published in 2008. She published her second book, a novel titled Disgruntled, in 2015.

Saeed Jones' poems engage themes of intimacy, race and power. He has received a Pushcart Prize and has also been awarded fellowships from Cave Canem and Queer/Art/Mentorship. He is the literary editor for BuzzFeed and lives in New York City.

Alexander Chee is an American fiction writer, poet, journalist and reviewer and author of Queen of the Night. Born in Rhode Island, he spent his childhood in South Korea, Kauai, Truk, Guam and Maine.

Anaïs Duplan '16 is a curator and poet. She is concerned with the intersections of Internet-based discourse, Black signification, and notions of both the Afrofuture and the Anthropocene.